Saturday, May 25, 2013

No One's Data is safe from the IRS

A veteran reporter is warning that members of the news media aren’t the only Americans who should be concerned about the privacy of their telephone conversations.

Gregory J. Millman of the Wall Street Journal, who says his telephone records were targeted by the IRS many years ago, writes that the communications of citizens could come to the attention of the government in a number of ways, including by getting a call from someone in whom the government has interest.

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Millman writes that his records were targeted in 1991 when he wrote a story citing an Internal Revenue Service memo.

However, he pointed out that when his records were taken by the IRS, he wasn’t the only one

“That’s how they happened to scoop up the phone records of a home builder, a trade association of corporate finance officers, an old friend who happened to live in Washington, D.C., and the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which supports investigative journalism and which I had called to discuss a fellowship.”

Millman says none of those people or organizations “had anything to do with the story at issue, and none learned until long afterward that IRS investigators had been secretly riffling through records of all their phone calls.”

Millman explains he learned only by accident that the records had been given to the government.